Hey there!
No worries, thought you'd just missed it or something.
OK so I've added the correct hreflang en-AU and en-NZ values to both the .co.nz and .com.au pages.
I've also gone into Google Search Console and confirmed that the .co.nz was targeting New Zealand which it is. I've also gone into Crawl and done a 'Fetch as Google' for the home page and blog page of .co.nz plus 'linked pages.' There are no hreflang errors.
I've also checked all pages on both sites and all correctly have the 'rel=canonical' tag.
Re the blog posts, at this stage we don't have the resources to write different content for each site. We're happy to keep writing the blog posts for the .com.au site and duplicating it for the .co.nz site AS LONG as our SEO isn't being negatively impacted. Our clients/markets/services are very similar — almost identical and just differ in location (i.e. Australia vs New Zealand).
The above was completed about 4 weeks ago now and we still haven't seen an increase in rankings for the .co.nz site (or back to where we were) — only for a couple of keywords that we're actually not targeting.
Just a couple of questions:
1. How long does it usually take for the hreflang tag to kick in and restore rankings?
2. How long does it take to actually get some keyword rankings for the new .co.nz site, considering that our .com.au site is performing reasonably well (although it is 5+ years older)?
3. Is there anything I'm missing here that I could do? Should I be really worried that the .co.nz site isn't ranking for our top 10 targeted keywords since launching the site back in February (6 months ago) or is it normal to break the '51+' ranking for at least some of the keywords. Sorry, a difficult question I know. In addition to Moz, I'm also tracking rankings on Ahrefs.
4. I'm outsourcing some of the link building, but I'm monitoring it closely. Could that be a reason for a drop in rankings also?
I know some of the above is a little hard to answer, but I'd really appreciate your help!